Stenography 101: How the press let Palin and Cheney rig the system

(Media Matters)

Not content with its lapdog coverage of President Bush over the past decade, the Beltway press has adopted a new, super-soft way to deal with Bush's former vice president, Dick Cheney, as well as GOP media star Sarah Palin. Journalists have set aside what had been decades' worth of guidelines and embraced special new rules for how Cheney and Palin get treated.

In a word, it's stenography.

That's how too many scribes have covered Cheney and Palin in recent months, allowing them to dispense tightly controlled pieces of information, which journalists then trumpet as breaking news. And yes, the trend is unprecedented in modern day American politics.

It's actually a two-fer. First, it's unprecedented because the Beltway press has never showered attention on political losers, such as Cheney and Palin. Meaning, the press has never cared what a former VP had to say about current events right after leaving the White House (think: Dan Quayle), or what a failed VP candidate had to say just months after losing in a landslide (think: Geraldine Ferraro). Traditionally, pundits and reporters disdain political losers (think: Mike Dukakis). But for Cheney and Palin, the rules have been generously reworked.

The second oddity is that journalists now allow Cheney and Palin to completely dictate the media ground rules and afford them the chance to have one-way relationships with the press.

Continue...

Rep. Eric Massa goes after Dick Cheney, Ed Schultz goes pitbull

Bravo, Eric!

Points:
Cheney was responsible (partly) for releasing two of the associates of the Undie-Bomber from Gitmo in 2007.

Rep. Senator Jim DeMint has blocked the confirmation of a TSA head for 9 months, placing the American traveling public in danger. (He also voted against passing a bill called the Improving America's Security Act of 2007, which among other things provided $250 million for airport security. Hypocrite.)

Then Ed calls Dick Cheney a coward and reminds us that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch while they "sat on their fat ass on vacation and did nothing about it".

Why can't Democrats grow some balls and tell it like it is?



I also particularly enjoyed Bob Cesca's new piece at HuffPost on Cheney's dig at Obama:

Needless to say, Cheney is well-qualified to take an authoritative posture when it comes to terrorism. After all, he and his little buddy "kept us safe" from terrorist attacks for eight years, right? Other than the worst terrorist attack in American history, of course, along with the Anthrax Attacks, the Beltway Snipers, the thousands of terrorist attacks on our contractors and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the attacks on our allies in London and Madrid, Cheney did a fine job keeping us safe (more about this in my book). Good job, Mr. Cheney!

So it wasn't any surprise when Cheney stopped thumbing through Uncle Billy's misplaced $8,000 long enough to fire off a few words about the failed Underpants Bomber attempt and the Obama administration's response. And since Dick Cheney is a very serious terrorism expert -- mainly because more Americans died in terrorist attacks on his watch than any other vice president ever -- the media gobbled it up, practically unchallenged.

O'Donnell and Scarborough battle over Cheney

Lawrence O'Donnell joined the panel on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Thursday and got into a heated debate with host Joe Scarborough over Dick Cheney's recent remarks accusing the Obama administration of "dithering while America's armed forces are in danger" and "putting politics over security and turning the guns on our own guys."

Scarborough tried to defend Cheney, stating that while he personally disagrees with the former vice president's comments, Cheney "speaks for a large chunk of America who is far more aggressive in foreign policy than those of us that live inside this bubble."

O'Donnell jumped into the conversation, leveling heavy criticism at Cheney:

The dithering thing is great because Cheney, of course, did not dither, did not dither for a minute, when the time came to make a wild guess, an outright crazy wild guess, about are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And Cheney sat there in the White House and said, you know what, I've got everything I need to make my wild guess. On the basis of my wild guess I'm going to tell the country it's an actual fact, and then I'm gonna help send American soldiers there to die over a lie. No dithering when it came time to do that.

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Retired General Paul Eaton, senior adviser to the National Security Network, has hit back at Cheney, calling him an incompetent war fighter:

The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.

The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy 'experts' have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. Simply put, Mr. Cheney sees history throughout extremely myopic and partisan eyes.

I can't hear you over the sound of Ed Schultz's brass balls clanging

Joe Doucheborough asked Ed Schultz for his opinion on the question: "Does Dick Cheney want Americans to get killed in another attack so he'll be proven right?"

Now, Joe knew the answer, because Ed said it last night on The Ed Show. But Ed stepped up and said "absolutely" and then talked about how he thinks Dick Cheney is a ruthless politician that is all about power.

Joe then does what Joe does: condescendingly sat back and scolded while his myna birds nodded their heads.

Uncut Dick

Jon Stewart takes on Dick.

Dick Cheney blamed Richard Clarke for leaving the nation vulnerable to attack ahead of 9/11 saying, "He obviously missed it." Cheney was referring to the threat from al Qaeda which Clarke had emphatically warned the administration about several times before the fall of 2001.

Jon Stewart was not pleased with Dick Cheney for these accusations, nor the members of the National Press Club who failed to challenge him about the assertion.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Dick (Uncut)
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Lawrence O'Donnell hammers Liz Cheney on waterboarding

1) He hits her on her (and her father's) contraidctory positions
2) What kind of person sends his daughter out to defend him? Why doesn't he engage the national media himself? (the answer being obvious)

Cheney used torture used to build a phony case for Iraq war

It's beginning to appear that torture was not only used under the guise of "keeping the country safe" after 9/11, but also to build a case for war with Iraq, especially as evidence piled up that Iraq did not have WMD's.

As more information leaks out, it appears that the Bush Administration was torturing detainees in order to build, then buttress, it's case that Saddam Hussein was an iminent danger to the U.S.

(CNN)
Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney's office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration's case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi's allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration's case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

This is becoming a web of lies almost too big to fathom. We have the Vice-President of the United States authorizing torture in a bid to create a case for war because he knows that conventional means won't work.

(Josh Marshall via Sullivan)
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

He orders the torture ostensibly to protect American lives, and now demonizes the Obama Administration for not continuing the "advanced interrogations. Cheney accuses Obama of endangering American lives, leaving out a major part it: his own administration did not use advanced interrogation in it's second term. As Colin Powell's top aide says:

"What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama's having shut down the "Cheney interrogation methods" will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?" — Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former
chief of staff of Colin Powell's Department of State

Plus, in a bid to demonize the Speaker of the House, the GOP are creating distractions about what she knew and when she knew it. Never mind that she was in the minority party that was being steamrolled, and painted as unpatriotic for opposing the buildup to war.

I've opposed the cries of "war crimes". Until now. I think we're approaching that arena.

The funny: Stewart mocks GOP hatred for empathy; Letterman takes on Cheney

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Justice Is Bland
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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Three-Minute Confirmation Stick
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David Letterman - "Dick Cheney: How'd He Do?"

Rove, Cheney diagnosed with Balzheimer's

(Huff Post)
Jon Stewart took a few minutes at the top of Wednesday night's show to marvel at the way Dick Cheney and Karl Rove had become, for the first time ever, advocates for such concepts as accountability, and transparency, and not telling the American people to go and suck it, every single day of their lives. "It seems the classifiers have become the declassifyees," an attitude that contrasted distinctly with about every clip of the two men the Daily Show had in their archives.

So, what gives? An acute inflammation of partisan hackery? Actually, the diagnosis was Balzheimer's Disease:

STEWART: Balzheimer's is a terrible illness, that attacks
the memory, and gives its victims the balls to attack others for things that
they themselves made a career of. There is no known cure. But it can be treated,
with body art.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Balzheimers Disease
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And in what sort of world do Dick Cheney and Karl Rove decry partisanship and passionately declare their support for government transparency? The only explanation is Bizarro Washington, to which correspondent John Oliver was dispatched. "It's here and only here where this news makes sense. There, he discovered that up is down, Barney Frank is straight, and the Dick Cheney is a "merry old soul" who the children call "Saint Dickolas."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Bizarro Washington
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Axelrod v. Turd Blossom

Axelrod To Bush Advisers: Butt Out

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, had harsh words for some of former President Bush's closest advisers during an interview with the Post's Lois Romano yesterday, dismissing as "intramural stuff" the critiques offered by the former Administration.

Axelrod praised Bush for his handling of the transition while sharply criticizing some of the former president's advisers.

Axelrod said he was "disappointed" by former Vice President Dick Cheney's comments regarding the planned closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison and the suggestion that it would increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack; he described himself as "surprised" by former White House chief of staff Andy Card's remark that not wearing a jacket in the Oval Office was disrespectful.

But, Axelrod saved his strongest condemnation for the man who held his job in the Bush White House: Karl Rove. Of Rove's criticism of Obama's economic stimulus plan, Axelrod said: "The last thing that I think we are looking for at this juncture is advice on fiscal integrity or ethics from Karl Rove -- anyone who's read the newspapers for the last eight years would laugh at that."

Rove did not return an email seeking comment. But, he did pen an op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal in which he starkly criticized the way Obama has gone about addressing the financial crisis and heaped praise on congressional Republicans for how they have handled the matter.